


and he tastes like home

by interestinggin



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Het, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Sexual Content, trainwreck relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-29
Updated: 2013-10-29
Packaged: 2017-12-30 21:09:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1023407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/interestinggin/pseuds/interestinggin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Love is for children, and she never was a child, after all."</p><p>Barton and the Widow; this is the short version.<br/>(You'll never get to hear the long one.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	and he tastes like home

_let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain / you like your girls insane_  
 _choose your last words / this is the last time_  
 _'cause you and I, we were born to die_  
\- Born To Die, Lana Del Rey

 _louder than sirens, louder than bells, sweeter than heaven and hotter than hell_  
\- Drumming Song, Florence and the Machine

 

She’s scarlet roses gripped in her teeth and cheap vodka necked back and heels so high they give him sympathetic vertigo, he’s microwave popcorn and slimline shades and calloused fingers; she’s text-book emotional repression and he grew up in a circus; she speaks eight languages and doesn’t care for any of them and he always hated his father, and they shouldn’t work but they do.

That’s the short version. Are you sure you want to hear the rest?

 

The first time they kiss is for a job. Clint’s undercover as a runt in a gang and Natasha’s supposed to be the daughter of an ally. She finds him just as he’s about to get in trouble, and before he can cover his surprises she silences him with a clash of cherry-tainted lips and teeth. They let her take him, in the circumstances – wouldn’t do to make her daddy pissed, after all, and it’s not like he’s a great loss.

“ _Spasiba_ ,” says the man who she currently thinks of as Barton, driving them both back to the safe house.

“Don’t get into stupid situations like that again,” she says curtly, taking off her heels and rubbing at her feet.

The smile on his face betrays him, even under streetlights and neon. “Oh no. Never again.”

 

When she’s drunk she swears in Russian and smashes her glass on the bar; her reflexes become almost human; she almost acts it, too. She has a melancholy streak a mile wide when she wants to. And she has a tendency to sing.

“…will not let th’ darkened wiiiings fly over motherlaaand…”

“Am I going to have to carry you out?” asks Clint, unimpressed. Normally he’s the drunk one, dancing on the tables and making out with marks they’re not supposed to fraternize with. Normally she clips him round the ear and drags him home. But it was a very long job.

And the mark was one of their own, once.

“American,” she spits into her empty glass.

“Yep,” he says, considering patting her on the head and deciding he likes his hands too much, “I’m a true force of exploitation. You’ve had enough.”

“You’re oppressing me.”

“And you’re using a national identity that you don’t subscribe to to win an argument.”

The smirk spreads slowly across the little of her face that he can see, lipstick smeared on the side of her glass. She chuckles, inhales the alcohol fumes, and coughs for the first time that evening.

“Agent Romanov,” he says fondly, “you’re drunk.”

She points a finger and raises her head blearily. “I can kill you,” she informs him, “with every joint in my body.”

“Not right now, you can’t,” Clint replies, and with that he smacks down fifty dollars on the bar, picks her up in a fireman’s lift, ignoring the furious stream of abuse, and carries her out to the car.

 

Neither of them remembers when this started.

(This is a lie. They both remember Nepal.

They are spies, after all.

After one excruciating attempt at a discussion of feelings, they both agreed not to remember when this started.)

 

Most of the time when they’re together, the one thing they try not to discuss is work. Most of the time, that’s all either of them have to talk about. So they don’t talk – not with words. They talk with fists in hair and his tongue on her slit and her thighs round his waist and him pressing kisses to her spine and losing himself in the way that she wishes him dead in a language he doesn’t understand.

“Fuck, Tasha,” he hisses once, forgetting himself, and she stills beneath him.

“What did you call me?” she asks.

“Uh –” says Clint, blinking. He tries desperately to forget that he is buried in her to the hilt and seconds from climax in an attempt to answer. “I – uh – did I say… something?”

“You called me Tasha,” she says, in a strangled tone.

“Yeah,” he manages, sweat still sticking his hair to his forehead. She is beautiful like this – no, not beautiful, but explicit and vicious and stunning nonetheless. “Is – sorry, is that-”

She swallows, reaches a hand up to his shoulder, and digs nails in hard enough to bruise. “Do it again,” she whispers.

“Tasha?” he murmurs, and she lets out a little whimper that might just be weakness. He doesn’t ask again, but keeps her name spilling from his lips over and over, as easy as her lies, and every time she twitches, moans and squeezes tears from her eyes as she struggles to a climax that takes him with her.

Later he strokes her hair as she falls asleep in his arms, guard down – though only for a while, and there are still knives under the pillow. Some things are reassuringly constant. He whispers “Tasha,” into her ear to send her off to dreams, and she dreams of a cold land that never was her home, and people who never called her anything but Widow, and always, always, a gun.

 

Budapest comes later, and while she remembers the fight, outnumbered and glorious and with a few deaths at her hands that she is personally and professionally proud of, and the way his arrows always flew true, he remembers winter sunlight on her hair, and debriefing in Memento Park with his arm in a sling and a bruise round her eye, and how he had never before understood how men would let her swallow them whole.

 

He doesn’t cry in her arms when she gets him back, and she doesn’t tell him how terrified she was for him. Instead he calmly thanks her for hitting him in the head, and she holds his hand and tells him that it will get better, and refuses to let him think about the blood on his hands (literally, stuck under his fingernails) and when that doesn’t work, she kisses him until he has no doubts about how scared she was, and she can feel him trembling in her arms.

She doesn’t tell him that she loves him.

He doesn’t ask.

Love is for children, and she never was a child, after all.

 

There are explosions, and really, it’s just like any other day; it’s just that this time the explosions are alien, and there are other people to take into account. Natasha calls them collateral, Clint calls them stupid. Both of them, deep down, call them useless.

“Are you _literally_ insane?” he yells into his comm, as she swings up onto a Chitauri steed and starts to punch in the groin creatures that, for all she knows, may not have groins. “Are you genuinely trying to get yourself killed, you stupid damn-”

“Comms are for necessary dialogue only, Barton,” she hisses, sticking a knife in deep between the ribs of the driver.

“If you die,” he spits, shooting at a creature trying to fly past him unnoticed without really looking – god, he’s so furious – “I swear to god I am not paying to have you cleaned off the Manhattan sidewalk.”

She smirks, though he cannot see her. “I expect a breakdown of staggering proportions and possibly alcohol abuse.”

“Tasha,” Clint murmurs, and she jerks her knife higher up, and turns the monster to the right, and though he's half a mile away, throws him a wink.

"Shut up and get off the line, bird boy.”

 

And where do they go, at the end of it all? She has a home in every city, and he has none at all, and they can’t go back to the barracks, not now when Coulson’s blood is still staining walls. They take a walk through Central Park in the summertime and watch children threatening to fall into the Pond. They keep walking, down Seventh Avenue, past the wreckage of a building, right down through through Times Square where the giant screens have Tony’s face on them and no-one looks or sounds American and everyone is, even if they only got there today. They keep on walking, and at some point, her hand slips into his.

“Agent Romanov-” he begins, with a line that’s probably cutting and delightful, but she doesn’t even look.

“Coffee,” she says, bluntly, “and Chinatown noodles. Now.”

He nods, smiles, squeezes.

Day after day, battle after battle, they just keep walkin’ on.

**Author's Note:**

> This work was adapted into a podfic by the incredibly talented [chestnutfilly](http://chestnut-filly.dreamwidth.org/28948.html) \- check it out and tell her you love it.


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